Chobani’s Newest Food Incubator Is Boosting Veterans’ Food Businesses

In the fall of 2016, Chobani started a business incubator to provide like-minded but smaller food startups with $25,000 in equity-free funding and the coaching necessary to grow to the next level. The idea was to expand the ecosystem of socially good and health-focused companies, but Chobani, it turns out, has learned as much about its own business as the companies in the incubator have learned from Chobani.

Last year, Chobani realized its program wasn’t doing a great job reaching female and minority business owners, so it broadened its recruitment strategy. Their spring 2019 class was, in contrast, especially diverse. Next month, Chobani will use another lesson to launch its first incubator class for veterans. The move comes after analyzing the applications for its last round, which featured a pool of more than 600 companies but only 15 led by people with previous military service. “That’s such a small number relative to the number of applications that we saw,” says incubator director Zoe Feldman. “I dug a little deeper and saw that [the ones who did enter] were family-owned businesses, very small, and really representative of all demographies across America.”

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“We have a belief: if we can’t make something better, we don’t make it at all. And for some time, we’ve felt that people deserve better non-dairy options,” said Hamdi Ulukaya, Founder and CEO of Chobani. “We’ve come up with something that’s much better than what’s out there – a new recipe that’s absolutely delicious, but also meets our food philosophy of being nutritious, made with only natural ingredients and at a price that’s accessible to all. …

“As the founder of a yogurt company that takes in a billion pounds of milk each year, we depend on more than 1,000 dairy farms across America, and wolves are the least of their problems. Thanks to record-low milk prices, dropping dairy consumption rates, industry consolidation, global competition and unfair and untrue consumer fears that dairy causes everything from cancer to diabetes, America’s dairy farmers are facing their worst crisis since at least the Great Depression.” …

Building upon the company’s dairy industry initiative Milk Matters™, Chobani is launching their second limited-edition charity flavor, called Farmer Batch, which is made in partnership with American Farmland Trust (AFT), a non-profit dedicated to saving the land that sustains us by protecting farmland, promoting sound farming practices and keeping farmers on the land. …